But he knows everything about us, “And what about that pig you’re going to butcher and sell?”
“But Boss, that’s our personal business. We’ve been working for you for a lot of years now, and it’s been a real long time since we had a raise.”
In the beginning, it’s like a game. We know each other. We smile. We even promise him a kilo of meat for his family: real good meat, fed with green bananas, delicious, mouth-watering, koupè dwèt!
We laugh a little and then he says, “I’ll see what I can do, but you know how it is: taxes, city halls that don’t pay me when they should, the cost of building materials, the suppliers who’re always after me. You can’t reason with them, you know . . .”
Quite the performance.
After a week goes by, we bring it up again and he blows up. And since then, he’s been yelling nonstop, a kontinyé, like he’s trying to keep us from speaking, like he wants to intimidate us so much we won’t dare mention our next pay and the raise.
Christmas went by, joud’lan too.
He only paid us part of what he owed; we’ll have to wait for the rest. Same old song.
“I don’t have the money. I’m waiting for the prefecture to give me the rest. It’s on its way. A friend is helping me out. You have to have people in place when you work with the government. You always have to know somebody. They pay the big guys first. Everything they owe them. Cash on the barrelhead. The big construction companies carry weight, but us little guys, we have to fight. We practically have to be drowning before we get any action. And then there’s that old crone who’s holding up the dockets because her daughter . . . Anyhow, it’s a long story, but men, you know how nasty our fellow citizens can be, especially women. That’s why, if it were up to me, I’d be an American. You know I really am like an American, just not like a black one; I’m helping you guys carry the weight of your skin!”
But the money never came, so one day in January, after the holidays, I went to their house and took their radio, that big radio they had in their living room. I went in and said I’d return it when he gave me the money he owed me. He wasn’t home, and his wife watched me do what I had to do without saying a word.
We know each other pretty well, her and me, because sometimes I work on their house. Every time the boss has a little extra cash, he does some more construction. He already has two floors, but the second one needs to be finished, and he’s thinking about a third.
Madame Emmanuel doesn’t talk much, but she’s good to us. She brings us a glass of cool water when we’ve been swallowing too much dust, sand, and cement.
She knew I respected her, even if I was taking their radio.
So when I was almost out the door, she says to me, “I understand, Guy-Albert. But try to understand too. It’s difficult for him, and hard for us as well. Not all the time, as it is for you, I know that, but if he’s telling you he doesn’t have the money, it’s true. If you want the radio, take it. I understand.”
My wife and I spent some quality time enjoying that brown and tan radio. In the evenings, we picked up all kinds of information in our bedroom, with the radio sitting next to our bed.
We covered it with a table runner during the day to keep the dust out, protecting it just like I’d found it, under a cloth, the day I carried it out of Emmanuel Absalon’s house.
Every night we uncovered it and turned the dials very carefully, traveling to unknown cities and listening to foreign languages and music we’d never heard before. For a whole week, my wife and I tasted the magic of voices in the night, glued to each other—well, my wife was pressed against my back to better hear the words coming from the other side of the bed, from on top of my nightstand.
It’s from listening to all those voices and all that news from everywhere imaginable that I started to understand why I didn’t really feel complete—as if there were too many things I didn’t know.
And it was when I was turning the two big dials next to the speaker—watching the needles pass over the list of all those little names painted in white on the channel finder—that I realized we were trapped on a little piece of land, with the sea chewing at every side, shrinking because of the waves; nearly underwater with no way of getting out. Even the radio’s crackling seemed to be coming from underwater.
But at the same time, my wife and I had some real good laughs! Boy did we laugh when we discovered they were talking about us in cities real far away, in regions of France we’d never heard of, like that time we heard a farmer from Béarn. Where the hell is Bearn? He grew yams. You had to hear that radio guy ask what they looked like!
“It’s like a morning glory,” and my wife says, “What’s a morning glory?”
“And the leaves are like ivy.” My wife says, “What do ivy leaves look like?”
“Well, I guess they look like yam leaves,” I say.
“It’s almost like a grapevine.” (Grapevine?) “You attach them to iron spikes with wire. It tastes sort of like a potato, a new potato, the most expensive ones.” (Oh come on!) “It cooks up easy and is quite delicate.”
“So what does it look like? What if I told you it looks like the cudgel Hercules carried over his shoulder?” (Really, a cudgel with little hairs sprouting out of its end? I mean, really, little hairs?)
Well I supposed this amused their listeners. Anyhow, it sure made us laugh!
“There’s not much of a market for yams in France. But students from Martinique”—(hey, what about Guadeloupe?)—“from North Africa and from sub-Saharan Africa are always happy to see products they’re used to eating at home. And I think they’d be very good for people who have restricted diets. Because yams don’t absorb much fat, they’re really easy to digest.” Wow, the things we learned. “And you can accompany yams with a white wine from the region.”
My wife and I listened hungrily to that radio, right up till the day the gendarmes came for it.
It wasn’t Madame Emmanuel who called them. She would never have done that.
When they knocked on the door, they were pretty polite. After all I’d always been an easy law-abiding guy. It was the first time my boss had issued an official complaint against me, and they knew me a little from the neighborhood . . . We’d even crossed paths at the corner store on Mayoute. They knew I wasn’t somebody who’d make a scene, and as long as I gave the radio back without making any trouble, they’d hold nothing against me. I didn’t resist, but I was sorry to see that radio go. We didn’t even have time to use the record player attached to the top. It was under a little cover that raised up when you hooked it to a folding metal rod.
So I gave back the radio, but I realized we’d crossed a line, Absalon and me.
That’s why I threatened him, “An ké fann kyou aw on jou! Révolvé-la ou ni an vwati aw-la, défyé’w pou i pa sévi pou’w menm!”
Obviously he fired me. I would have fired myself! What kind of person threatens to kill somebody like that? He didn’t hire me back for two whole weeks, and I couldn’t find any other work. But Madame Emmanuel and my wife sorted it out. The wives managed to calm us down.
“Guy-Albert, we need that work and Boss Absalon isn’t as bad as all that.”
So we talked it out, just the two of us, in private, man to man. He hired me for another job. But when he yells now, I don’t pay him any mind because he knows I’m no tèbè, not the dumbass he thought I was. I saw in his eyes he’s afraid of me! Sometimes he’ll still yell at me in front of the other guys, just to show them who’s boss.
But I know how scared he is so I’m leaving a door open for him. That’s the way it is: you always have to prepare an exit for your enemy, so he won’t turn into a wild beast. The door’s cracked open, and as long as he lowers his eyes, he can yell as much as he wants.
5.
The principal is waiting for us at the entrance to the school.
She grabs us by the arms, all of Madame Ladal’s thirty-two students; she digs her super-long nails into our flesh and corners us against the wall i
n her office.
I start thinking about what we’d yelled at the concierge on Wednesday. We took off like lightning, and neither the principal nor Madame Parize tried to catch us. But now we’re going to get it!
I don’t try to fight the principal, but some of my classmates do.
Elizabeth pulls her arm away and screams, “What’s going on?”
The principal doesn’t answer, so the students huddle closer together. We pout like clown fish while the other classes line up outside to go into their classrooms.
The concierge is hanging on to the long rope attached to the big bell in the courtyard. She’s ringing and ringing it, and while I watch her, I remember everything our teacher taught us about the school bell: “Words have a lot of different meanings. For example, a bell has a brain, a lower lip, shoulders, a belly, and a robe.”
I also remember how she forgot to draw the bell on the board so we could put labels on where the brain, the lip, the shoulders, the belly, and the robe were all located.
Our teacher isn’t anywhere in the courtyard. We look at each other; we say to ourselves: she isn’t here. I try with all my might to accept it, but I can’t.
When all the teachers have gone up to their rooms, the principal calls out our names from her big book of students and she separates us into little groups.
“The first ten students will go to Madame Desravins’s class.”
Nobody moves.
“Do you hear me? From Absalon to Chathuant.”
But nobody moves.
6.
It’s always on a Saturday morning that we do it—kill the pig, I mean. Early morning, just when the sun rises. Sometimes everybody in the neighborhood’s still asleep, but we always tell them the night before. Tomorrow is the pig’s day. That way the animal’s squeals don’t catch them unawares.
This year I decided that Julien Ladal, a red-haired guy who rents some land next to my pigpens, should be part of the gang—my neighbors and my family—who gets a share of the pig. That is, I could sell him some, because we don’t really give it away; we sell. I haven’t known the man for long, but he’s already become someone I trust; my people, so to speak.
It happened as though it was always meant to. I’d seen him arrive and get his animals settled. He knew what he was doing with them, even if he was a city man from La Pointe. And that was easy to see when he spoke: too loud. That was the first thing. He spoke too loud like he had to drown out some kind of noise inside himself; and whatever the mess was, it had to be goddamn powerful, because you could hear him talk from the top of the hill when he was tying his cow up at the bottom—even if it was just the cow he was talking to, saying God knows what. Except sometimes he came with another really big fellow who spoke even louder than he did.
And he had this hat, a brand-new straw hat that was too big. One of those bacoua hats that make guys think they look like a real peasant, except that we don’t wear bacouas. That’s what guys in Martinique wear, so you notice it. Where the hell did he pick that up from?
Anyhow, we weren’t going to get mad at him because he had the wrong hat; maybe somebody gave it to him. You can’t judge a guy by his hat, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from making fun of him a little.
Our friendship formed slowly.
I hadn’t realized it until I met him, but I was lonely. I mean, I really felt all alone in the world. I didn’t know what was wrong, but my buddies said I was “morose,” that was the word they used: “Guy-Albè, ou ka sanm sa ki moròz!”
Morose? I guess I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my life, only that everything seemed a little empty to me.
When I came home from work in the early afternoons, I was clean. I’d showered. Even if I had some limestone dust on my black skin, you could see I was clean. I had the right to sit down in front of the plate my wife had put on the table, covering it with another plate or a white cloth. I’d earned the right to have my meal, to sit down under my own roof and stretch out for a little nap before leaving at the end of the afternoon to take care of the pigs, and maybe have a drink with my buddies at the corner store.
I had all that in my life: a roof, a wife, children, work, but I still felt empty. When that emptiness reared its head in plain daylight, when it was so clear my heart plunged into my stomach and I got weak in the knees, well, then I didn’t even feel like talking. Couldn’t even enjoy the joking, the laughs that help you get through the sadness when nature is too calm, when the morning is dead silent, when the hills are still covered up by fog.
Enough of the jokes, enough bursts of anger after a couple of glasses too many, enough wouklaj—because complaining doesn’t get you anywhere.
When Julien showed up in his bacoua hat, I shied away from him at first, but then I saw he was a good guy, really: not a bit mean, always ready to lend a helping hand, drive a woman to town, bring back something for a neighbor, accept your offer of a drink without making a big deal of it and without drinking the whole bottle like he was dying of thirst, and not minding at all if you took some of his grass for your own rabbits: “I don’t have any trouble with it as long as you don’t mind watering my animals when I’m not here.”
In other words, a good neighbor. So when I decided to slaughter that pig, I suggested he enjoy it too—real good meat, cheaper than at the butcher’s shop, and always weighed so you get a little bit more for your money.
And he, too, started slowly telling me about his life, especially about the union. I usually didn’t trust union guys, didn’t even know why. I liked my own space, as they say, I liked being by myself. Even my work buddies . . . I didn’t spend that much time with them, just the bare minimum so they wouldn’t take me for a snob, calling me an “aristocrat,” the way they do here.
“Unions are good, you know, so you don’t have to stand up to your boss all by yourself.”
When he said that, I kept thinking of Absalon and all the little issues I needed to bring up with him. At the same time, he didn’t really feel like the kind of boss Julien, my new friend, was talking about: a boss who gets rich, who mistreats his workers, who makes a huge profit—a capitalist.
I’d known Absalon for such a long time, it seemed that even if he wanted to build himself a big house, in the end, he was more like me, with nine kids to provide for. I didn’t see how Julien could cut everybody from the same cloth.
I told him that: “You shouldn’t put all the hens in the same chicken coop.”
I had a point. That’s what he said. He listened to me speak and thought about my ideas; he wasn’t one of those guys who has all the questions and all the answers, and all the ballots to shove into the ballot box.
He could change his mind if what he was thinking didn’t correspond to what you’d experienced in real life.
We often sat down to gab, just the two of us, under a tree. I didn’t want him to come to my house too often, didn’t want people in the neighborhood to say I was turning into a communist. Because, and that’s how it goes—and how it went—it only took two or three comments in the back room of the corner shop on Mayoute for everybody who was a Besson communist to start saying that Julien was a strange one, not really fish not really foul, kind of in the Party and kind of not. More like a dissident.
“A fella who talks too much.”
That’s what Célaure concluded. He was one of the faithful and knew Julien a little, but as they say, their dogs weren’t in the same race.
I wasn’t going to start an argument with Célaure, so I got out of there.
As far as I was concerned, they could take their political parties and shove them. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Nothing. I wasn’t afraid of having ideas, that wasn’t it, but what I wanted . . . well, I knew it had nothing to do with a party, with a vote, with a poster you put up, with a tract you hand out.
What I wanted was to make some progress, so I kind of liked this idea of a union. It meant I could join others to get the things we all knew we should have. Back then, I never thought
I’d end up facing a bunch of gendarmes, like when I took the boss’s radio.
In fact, it was Potiron who took me to my first meeting. Léon Potiron, the head of the new work site the boss had assigned me to. A guy who didn’t talk much, like me. A guy who didn’t always have a new joke to tell. Hey, fellas, you heard this one? A guy goes into a bakery to buy a loaf of bread, but he doesn’t remember if bread in French is masculine or feminine. So he asks for three loaves and avoids pronouncing the article, and when the baker brings them out, he says, take back two of them!
When the others started making fun of stuck-up French speakers or anybody else during a break, Potiron just looked at me, meaningfully. He’d sit down on a low-lying tree branch, wolf down his lunch without speaking, and then walk off to smoke a cigarette. He liked good cigarettes, not the kind you bought one at a time that cost next to nothing. His tobacco smelled good, and even though I didn’t really like to smoke, I’d wander over his way, over to his long white cigarettes, to his head slightly tipped to the left, with one eye closed, smiling the smile of a satisfied man.
We started talking about the work that never seemed to get done, the materials that hadn’t shown up yet, the boss who couldn’t tell us when we’d get the extractor we needed to grade the ground, now that the rocks had been removed.
I’m the one who asked if he knew how unions worked.
He looked nervous. “Why’re you asking me about that?”
“Because a friend talked to me about unions, but ours, the one for construction workers, well, he doesn’t belong to that one. I don’t know anybody who does, but I think maybe you do. And I trust you, don’t know why.”
He was silent, and we got back to work, but one day, after we’d finished, he came over to talk to me: “There’s a meeting tonight, if you want, but it’s in La Pointe.”
I worked things out with Julien so he’d drive me there after he fed his animals.
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